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Monday, January 16, 2012

Love and War: Remembering Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we remember Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. today, our thoughts are consumed by many of the challenges facing us all.

But our thoughts are probably not much different than many around the world. Hoping for the best, wishing for good things against all odds.

Maybe we're just a dreamin' man.

So for one man who had a dream, here's to livin' the dream.

LOVE AND WARWhen I sing about love and warI don't really know what I'm saying

I've been in love and I've seen a lot of warSeen a lot of people prayin'

They pray to Allah and the pray to the LordAnd mostly they pray about love and warPray about love and warPray about love and war

Seen a lot of young men go to warAnd leave a lot of young brides waitingI've watched them try to explain it to their kidsSeen a lot of them failingThey try to tell them and they try to explainWhy daddy won't ever come home again

Daddy won't ever come homeDaddy won't ever come home

Said a lot of things I can't take backBut I don't really know if I wannaI sang songs about love, I sang songs about warSince the backstreets of TorontoI sang for justice and I hit a bad chordBut I'll still try to sing about love and war

Saddest thing in the whole wide worldIs to break the heart of your loverI made a mistake and I did it againAnd we struggled to recoverI sang in anger hit another bad chordBut I still try to sing about love and war

Sing about love and warSing about love and war

Love and war

Forty four years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent.

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. . . .

It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through [Lyndon Johnson's] poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such . . . .

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. . . .

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. . . .

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

"If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell."-- "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.," 1968

yeah, did this one in 2006. It covers a bit more, but it's a look in the mirror to recognize that we are all the same, or at least in an eqaulity view, born the same. And should be the same in each others eyes with repsect to the life liberty and pusuit of happiness promised.